The first obstacle I found when I tried to learn Hadoop is I don’t have a cluster at home and I don’t want to pay for resources in the cloud. Even if you have access to a cluster, setting Hadoop could be an arduous task. There are too many new things to learn that I didn’t want to spend time trying to setting up Hadoop because it could result frustrating.
The good news is there are pre-configured Hadoop virtual machines that will help you to learn by yourself.
Here I listed three options, each one from a different Hadoop vendor. This is not a survey of Hadoop virtual machines, which would be very nice by the way.
The scope of this post is just to give some information about the possibility to learn Hadoop using your laptop or desktop computer.
Hadoop free download pre-configured VM: